Upper West Side Rents Are Up Nearly 30 Percent From Last Year

UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — Finding a place to live on the Upper West Side just keeps getting harder, as rents and home prices continue rising amid the city's pandemic recovery, according to a new report.

The study by StreetEasy looked at thousands of apartment listings around the city during the month of October. It found that the number of available rentals across the five boroughs had shrunk dramatically compared to last year, when the COVID-19-induced market had dropped rents to stunningly low levels.

Manhattan has seen the steepest inventory drop of any borough: the number of rentals on the market plummeted by 68 percent to 13,048 homes last month — its fewest since December 2012, the study found. (Excluding April 2020, when New York had just shut down as the virus spread.)

On the Upper West Side, the median home asking price for rent in October was $3,600, which is 29 percent higher than it was during the same month in 2020.

The median asking price to buy a home in the neighborhood has also gone up. The figure was $1,649,000 in October, up 18 percent from the same month last year.

The only figure tracked by the StreetEasy study that went down from last October on the Upper West Side was the median recorded home sale price. The median recorded price for neighborhood homes in October 2021 was $1.2 million, down 8.60 percent from the same period last year.

In terms of looking from month to month on the UWS in 2021, both the median asking rent and the median recorded sales price went up from September to October.

Median Asking Rent

• September 2021: $3,550
• October 2021: $3,600

Median Recorded Sales Price

• September 2021: $1.15 million
• October 2021: $1.20 million

The median asking home sale price did go down, though, on the Upper West Side from September to October.

Median Asking Home Sale Price

• September 2021: $1.65 million
• October 2021: $1.64 million

While the number of available homes in other boroughs has also shrunk, the drop has not been nearly as severe as in Manhattan — a trend that researchers attribute to Manhattanites who fled during the pandemic.

"Transient Manhattan renters were most likely to leave the city, either temporarily or permanently, during the height of the pandemic," StreetEasy economist Nancy Wu said in the report.

Indeed, a recent report by the city comptroller's office found that wealthy Manhattan neighborhoods saw the most residents flee the city during the pandemic, based on an analysis of change-of-address requests filed with the U.S. Postal Service.

Patch reporter Nick Garber contributed to this report.